William Gibson discusses "growing up in Virginia, becoming renowned as a science-fiction seer, and the process of writing his latest novel, Spook Country," in this Onion A.V. Club interview.

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Beloit College has created its Mindset List for the incoming college class of 2011. The list is an effort "to identify a worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2007." Some examples:

10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.

39. Fox has always been a major network.

55. MTV has never featured music videos.

61. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

Adam Gopnik examines the life and novels of Phillip K. Dick in this New Yorker article.

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Are we all living in someone's computer simulation? In this New York Times article, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom says, “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

James Carville explains "How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans" in this Financial Times column.

James Surowiecki discusses what's wrong with student loans in this New Yorker article.

"This convoluted process is good at making student-loan companies rich—Sallie Mae, the biggest issuer of student loans, earned $1.3 billion last year, with a return on equity that dwarfs most other companies’. But it’s not very good at getting government money to students cheaply and efficiently. President Bush’s 2007 budget shows, for instance, that it’s four times as expensive for the government to subsidize and guarantee private loans as for it to issue those loans itself. In other words, the current system is not just corrupt. It’s also inefficient. So why are we stuck with it?"

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William Gibson discusses his new novel Spook Country in this Wired interview.

Maps of War presents an animated map showing the History of Religion in 90 seconds.